People Are Always Asking Me If I Know InuYasha
by The Voice in the Wilderness
Summary: This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time... only when we've lost everything are we free to do anything. If these lines sound familiar, then enjoy. An attempt at meshing InuYasha with the blackest comedy of my age. A work in slow progress...


_All "InuYasha" characters belong to Rumiko Takahashi and associated copyright holders. Nearly everything else about this weird king-hell high-life fuck around borrows heavily from Chuck Palahnuik and David Fincher - not to mention Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. No money is being made from this fan fiction. No infringement is intended.  
_

People are always asking me if I know InuYasha…

The fang at my throat is gleaming steel-coated death, held so tight to my heaving throat in your careless, iron fist that I know if I utter a word, I'm wearing a Cuban necktie before I can think to care how clean that blade is.

"Five minutes until she comes out… think of all we will have accomplished."

_What's five minutes once the end of the world reigns down on our heads?_

You cock a bushy black brow at my sweating, panic-stricken face and sneer, a fang hanging over one those lips the girls swoon for. "Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion?"

I swallow and immediately regret it with a started grunt. Is that blood dripping down my neck I feel? Whispering with as little air exchange as possible I know your peaked ears will hear me: "I still can't think of anything."

Suddenly, it comes to me as I see a lone figure coming towards our eager (petrified) watch, walking slow on coltish legs – all this, the sword, the jewel, the power over all creation, of all life, death and power, all has something to do with a girl named Higurashi Kagome.

~*~

My knees together, sitting in this awkward little huddle of strange and tortured souls, I know I'm nothing to anyone else, a perfect circle – an empty slate. The lectures I give consist of dry, well-rehearsed sound and fury – my single-serving tales of magic and wonder, cleverly disguised by the thin veneer of scholarship and scientific labels. I was lecturing on ancient folklore as an associate professor. My job was Applying the Formula: monster plus damsel plus hero equals life lesson. A + B+ C = X.

Any fool can make this shit up – drop a Bazooka gum wrapper in the dirt for a thousand years and it becomes gospel. Every time a student shuffled a fist full of papers, I prayed they were leveling a MAC -10 at my head to paint the walls with my brains.

Pushing the glasses further up my nose, I clear my throat and begin to speak.

Students hung on my every word as I confessed yet another tale to the blank wall opposite my podium. And then she… ruined… everything.

"This Feudal Era Humanities, right?" she snapped out between bored pops of pink gum.

~*~

Higurashi Kagome wasn't studying Anthropology. She wasn't working on a dissertation, a research fellowship or a comparative survey of Asian Culture Studies. She was a tourist. Every time I opened my mouth to speak about the environmental pressures of the Sengoku Jidai as shown in mythical archetypes, she was there – her worn patent stilettos perched on the seat in front of her, never taking a single note, hardly ever blinking that bored, day-tripping look of her pale, Gothic-painted face.

Kagome. The little sore on the roof of your mouth that you wish you could quit tonguing but you can't. Her apathy reflected my own, however well-hidden and repressed I like to kid myself it is.

Faced with the overwhelming lie of my life – I couldn't sleep.

~*~

She's coming up to talk about her recent paper. I can feel my stomach slinging itself in a greasy hammock, threatening to douse my mahogany-veneered cubicle of an office with a biblical flood of trendy Starbuck's coffee, complete with life-rafts of Cinn-a-Bon for the survivors to cling to and kid themselves about the rescue by merciful god. The clomping ring of her latest spiked monstrosities drives slowly into my quivering, queasy brain. What dark, half-moldy and forgotten bride's maid dress will she be slinking around in today?

I see her long white legs in tatters of fish net, pale flesh peeking through stocking like scattered chemical burns and then I'm puking my guts up into my perfect and scholarly waste basket.

"Professor… yeah, so – what?" you roll your black, dull eyes at me as a formality. I can't pretend it's a courtesy.

A flash of silver and outraged yellow flickers in my eyes and is gone.

"Kagome, we need to talk about your grades in my class.", I glare over the rims of my perfectly professor wire-frames.

"Yeah." Pop goes that fucking gum again. Lying bitch.

"I saw you practicing this little scolding during the lecture." you smirk around the one blue-black finger nail in your mouth, no doubt making the ever-present gum jealous.

"Excuse me, what-?"

"Is it going as good as you hoped?" You look around lazily, see my perfectly collegiate monogrammed desk blotter and give me your snottiest grin. "_Professer_?"

~*~

I'm at the Sunset shrine to make some comparisons between differing era copies of the Shikon No Tama mythos cycle. Sitting in a dusty storeroom, pouring in an automatic way over the dustier documents, I can only think that the grunge of aeons is going to ruin my very-respectable Burberry suit. When the red clad man in temple garb walks in and starts pawing over the various priceless bits of shit in this mildewed hell-hole, I make every culturally-acceptable effort to pretend he's not there.

"Fairytales and legends – yup. The illusion of safety." the crimson-clad priest murmurs to himself too loudly to be politely ignored.

"Excuse me?" I politely ask, curious against all social etiquette.

"You like to think monsters and apocalypses aren't real. We all must think this is just an idiographic, metaphoric heap of bullshit and trade our boring little lives upon the fact. Look man, it's all right here." The priest pontificates in a sarcastic tone, nodding his long silver hair in subtle epiphany over a carelessly unfurled scroll he's unwound to peruse.

I'm curious; there's something so familiar about this man, something about him that shouts of hidden knowledge, a better kind of reality. A really fun, king-hell high-life fuck around from start to finish. I can't stop myself from looking over at the scroll he's holding out to me.

"See? Monsters, demons eating villagers, children and women. The single most important event of the age as the Shikon no Tama is shattered, but see? Blank faces, static poses – calm as Hindu cows." The priest's low slick voice persuades me in the dusty, close room.

My disconcerted laugh is the loudest thing in the world. The brief view of a world on its head through this scruffy, weirdly charged being's eyes and I'm hooked.

He tells me he's interested in temples when I ask him in a very routine way what he does for a living. Says he's an artist – pottery mostly. Hands me a card:

And this is how I met InuYasha.

"Hey – we have the exact same courier bag…"

InuYasha smiles at me and I suddenly feel like some cataclysmically retarded child who's just peed in the big-boy potty for the first time.

~*~

I start going to my colleague's lectures, yearning to lose myself in the dead air of the steady-state drone, a single-serving of scholarly vacuum. Tiny life.

I see Higurashi Kagome at nearly all of them. When I imagine the hero-bandits robbing a sedan chair from Edo in one of many tales, she's always the bored passenger – a perfectly anachronistic cigarette burn popping and snapping that infernal fucking gum in every day-dream or professional meditation. When I come home from a week-long symposium on Myth and Modernism, I am shell-shocked to find my apartment building burned to the ground. How embarrassing; a fridge full of designer miso and hand-crafted shoyu but no food. I suppose these things happen.

Even now, if you asked me, I can't tell you why I called him.

~*~

"It's an awful shame." He enthuses dryly around the rim of the sake cup, looking over my shoulder.

"I know. I had a nice stereo, a solid oak bookshelf nearly full of all the right texts, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable… I was close to being complete." I moaned drunkenly over my own oft-filled cup.

"Shit, man – now it's all gone." InuYasha helpfully supplies.

"Yeah, gone. But I mean, I think insurance will cover most of it.", I wave the cup and slop sake on my hand.

The priest-potter scratches the side of a grimy red bandana and slumps back in his seat, fixing me with a sharp eye, "Well, you did lose a lot of clever solutions for modern living." the lounging man sarcastically adds around another mouthful of booze.

"Do you know what the Shikon no Tama is?" the rough silver-haired man drills into my drunk-fuzzy ears with a sharp glare.

"Well, it's a mythical…" I start off in a lecturing tone.

"No – wrong. It's another name for power, ultimate power. All this other shit about 'metaphorical construct' and 'sublimated animistic wish-fulfillment'; is this essential to our survival in a hunter-gatherer sense of the world? I say, never be complete. I say the lust for ultimate power is the rock-bottom of our lives, man! Let's just battle it out, evolve and let the chips fall where they may!" InuYasha enthuses with a vehemence that is contagious. I can't get the smile of my numb face. Fuck the broken, grey world that needs action-item lists and structured, nice neat little packages that explain the elemental drives of our animal and spiritual lives.

InuYasha catches himself, swigs the last of his sake and regroups, drawing back.

"But that's just me and I could be wrong."

"No…I mean, it's just stuff, right?" I admit with a shrug, refilling both our cups.

"Let me tell you something; the things you own, end up owning you." The fuming lights in the darkened bar lend a yellow light to InuYasha's eyes and his words are a thunderclap of enlightenment.

~*~

"Jesus, 3 bottles of sake, 2 bottles of shochu and you still can't ask." InuYasha rearranges his kosode, shrugging within it.

"This is stupid." I feel stupid for being made to ask, like I'm a puppy being trained.

"Is it stupid for you to ask?" he shoots back at me.

"You called me out here because you need a place to stay – am I right? So just cut the foreplay and ask, man." The red-clad eccentric smirks and fishes two bottles of shochu out of his voluminous garb and sets it down on the dirty asphalt.

"Can I stay at your place?" I ask in a sing-song voice, wanting to slap the smug look off InuYasha's lean face. The man's eyes are still yellow in the sick halide parking lot light.

"Sure. Just one favor though."

"Yeah? What's that?" I say slightly slurring my words, happy not to have to sleep in a motel or worse tonight.

"I want you to take this…" A long sword-ish object is pushed suddenly into my hand

"… and try to hit me as hard as you can.", InuYasha finishes with a lopsided grim that's all business.

~*~

Blood's running out of InuYasha's right cheek; my left eye is swelling shut and that DNKY shirt around my left calf makes quite a nice tourniquet. Sore, bruised and sliced up like I tried to fuck a hand-held blender and lost. Feeling the blood rage and burn through my veins I can do anything; I want to burn and kill every stupid villager that ever got lucky in those old stories, I want to rape every stuck-up pure little miko-bitch that ever looked down her nose at the monster in those tales. I want to be the monster in those tales.

InuYasha heaves rattling breaths as he gingerly sits on the curb, one clawed hand to a wound I inflicted. The other hand slips up to assess the right side of his bandana covered head.

"Man, why the ear?!" he grouses and offers me a bottle to crack open for him.

"Well, Jesus – I'm sorry!" I yell back in heady embarrassment and secret pride. Now I won't die without any scars.

I crack the bottle, take a slug and hand it back to my new roommate, who smiles archly and takes a deep drink.

"We should do this again sometime." I muse.

~*~

Where you are now, you can't even begin to imagine what the bottom will be like.

Only when you lose everything are you free to do anything.


End file.
